Heidegger And The Political

POLITICAL THEORY / April 2000

Blitz / HEIDEGGER AND THE POLITICAL

HEIDEGGER AND THE POLITICAL

MARK BLITZ
Claremont McKenna College

Heidegger and the Political is the kind of topic that Heidegger did not like.

He always claimed to be uninterested in writing an ethics, an aesthetics, or
any other book in one of philosophy’s usual fields.

After all, one of his goals

was to put into question the ordinary divisions and subject matter of philoso-
phy. What is the unity from which these splits come about in the first place,
and how crisply articulated are they? Indeed, are even the usual terms through
which we study these subjects—the division, say, between subject and object
or between what something is and that something is—well grounded and
articulated? The fields of philosophy and the concepts we use to explore them
arise from and occur within this broader unity and ground, and it is to this that
Heidegger wanted to attend.

Heidegger also was wary of “Heidegger and Politics” because he did not

enjoy discussions that touched on his support for the Nazis, and how, one
might ask, could any discussion of his politics fail to do just that? Although
Heidegger’s amazingly subtle understanding of “is” usually enabled him to
say what his support of the Nazis “was” without lying, there was much that he
would have preferred to remain covered up. Heidegger by and large told the
truth, but not the whole truth.

Still, we are justified in examining Heidegger and politics on grounds that

stem from Heidegger himself and not merely from our external interests,
however urgent. Heidegger claimed from the beginning to the end of his work
that a unique connection exists between man and being. In one way or
another, being and man find their home in each other, although men necessar-
ily and at the same time have a wandering eye.

The openness of human

beings to being, and thus to beings as a whole and as such, is the basis for
every other characteristic and activity. Moods, discourse, ordinary and extra-
ordinary private and public attachments, art, work, philosophy, and states-

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© 2000 Sage Publications, Inc.

manship are all grounded in this essential relationship. Now, if we were to ask
earlier thinkers to name a subject whose heart is in one sense man’s soul and
in another sense the being of all the other beings but that is, most of all, about
how the powers of man and nature (and studying them) belong together,
political philosophy would be as likely an answer as any other. It would not be
the only answer, but it would certainly be a plausible one for Aristotle and
Plato. The city and its laws in a certain sense are about or include everything,
especially when we remember that philosophers and poets are citizens, what-
ever else they are.

Heidegger’s discussion of man and being, moreover, always includes ele-

ments that are as practical as they are theoretical. This is obvious in Being and
Time and the lectures preceding and immediately following it. In his later
publications too, however, he also discusses what “in any other man” we
would call practical issues and phenomena: action, the gods, the polis and its
regime, the will, history, National Socialism, Americanism, simple imple-
ments, and leadership, among others.

Several of these topics are essential

and not just discussed by the by. Again, were we to ask where in the past such
issues are discussed, practical philosophy—rhetoric, ethics, and, above all,
political philosophy—would be a plausible answer.

So, because Heidegger deals philosophically with many practical phe-

nomena and because his basic understanding puts man and being in each
other’s center, studying “Heidegger and the Political” is not only a product of
our current academic divisions or of our concern about his Nazism. Studying
what is political, as well as studying other issues from the point of view of
how they enter into man’s political rule, is a sensible way to come to under-
stand Heidegger generally.

Of course, Heidegger claims he is not engaged in practical philosophy,

and he calls nothing that he does political philosophy. And he mentions many
usual topics of political philosophy only glancingly, if at all. Thus, whatever
similarities in subject matter we might find, he would argue that his attention
is directed to a different place. In his later works, he claims to be oriented to
something other than what attracted the attention of any of the previous phi-
losophers: he is now considering what, qua philosophers, they needed to
ignore. In Being and Time and the accompanying works, his claim is not so
radical, but the intention of his thought is the same—namely, one that is
pointed to an area that previous philosophers took for granted.

Nonetheless, unless we are completely convinced that what these matters

“are” is to be located in the realm that Heidegger uncovers and that what he
discusses is a priori to the causes and grounds of human study and affairs,
then we should not take for granted the apparent priority or, at least, incom-

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mensurability of his subject with the philosophical study of human things.
The subject of politics (and its philosophical study) is central not because it is
an interesting area to which one would like to apply Heidegger’s thought but
because it is a different way to consider the status of what Heidegger uncov-
ers. Given that a new view of practical affairs is important in his work, and
given especially that if neither man (or philosophical “psychology” or con-
sciousness) nor “being” (or ontology or philosophy of “nature” or objectiv-
ity) but something about their correlation is the ground of things, then politi-
cal philosophy (and here we think especially of The Republic) is a likely
alternative or competitor. Studying Heidegger and the political is an espe-
cially fruitful way to challenge or confront him because politics as a subject
and the ways in which political philosophers have studied it suggest imma-
nent limits and alternatives to Heidegger’s analysis.

Heidegger, of course, did not say this, and his silence should give us pause.

Indeed, it would be fairly easy for a Heideggerian to imitate how Heidegger
might try to show that political philosophy is limited by being merely meta-
physical, even if it is a place where the commonality of man and being is
genuinely established, or that in fact it largely borrows from metaphysics and
establishes nothing by itself, or that it is for the most part merely technical
and useful. But our real pause should come from recognizing that Heideg-
ger’s investigations and political or practical philosophy cannot be simply
assimilated, whatever the similarity in subject and purpose. This will enable
us to see where exactly the transformations are that Heidegger seeks to effect,
what they are, and what their merit is. Nonetheless, and most crucially, we
should not become hesitant because we assume in advance that Heidegger
has in fact uncovered a new, comprehensive, and significant territory in
which everything else must take its place.

To confront Heidegger properly and to place correctly his own explicit

remarks about “the political,” we must consider Heidegger’s own purpose
and goal. This means that we must explore what Heidegger is seeking when
he seeks “being” because this is the (usually explicit) subject of all his lec-
tures and publications. I will discuss this in several ways, hoping in the end to
have generated some understanding.

One way to approach Heidegger’s “being” is to see that he is seeking the

correlative to what is most distinctively human (and in this sense, he also
seeks what is distinctively human). What is our language as such, and what is

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it about; what are our feelings as such, and what are they about? What are
these and what do they deal with when they are considered simply in them-
selves and are not considered to be caused or brought about by something
alien to them such as mechanical motions? What exactly is the distinctive
freedom that is aligned with these traits, and how “are” other things as they
matter to or are dealt with by our freely exercised characteristics? What are
the elements in things (including ourselves) that, although we do not create
them, can be what they are only when we allow them to be?

What is distinctive about us in this way is said to be our “being,” and what

is correlated to it is what other things are, beings as such, beings in their
being, including our own being as one of the things that we understand.
Beings in their being, as opposed to concrete characteristics that they have in
their being and to which we respond, are the proper and distinctive human
“objects.” And our proper and distinctive humanity, what our feelings and
language do as such and are about is to see, articulate, and respond to this
being. To see beings “as such” is to see them in their being, and to see them in
their being is precisely to see this “as such.” The ability to see beings as such
defines all men and is not the exclusive preserve of philosophers or poets,
although there is something special about “creators.”

III

Why does Heidegger claim that our being, that which uniquely defines our

traits and characteristics, is our relation to beings as such, including our own
being? One answer is that something’s “being,” how it “is,” stands for what is
unavoidable about it. Being is that about us and things that is always already
there, whatever else is. (Heidegger, of course, has a new understanding of
what this unavoidability is and how it happens.) It is embedded in any demar-
cation whatsoever, including the demarcation of ourselves.

Any way in

which we see or deal with something as this or that requires that we already
have articulated it as this thing that it is and not something else. A hammer
can be used as a hammer only because we first see that it is a hammer, which
in its case means only because we have already articulated a realm of rele-
vance and significance within which things—in this case the hammer—can
be ready for use.

This “a priori” relation to beings as such might seem too primitive and ele-

mentary to count as what we are distinctively, let alone primarily. In a sense,
however, all philosophy makes this claim. For Plato, Aristotle, and (accord-
ing to Heidegger) the pre-Socratics, what something is is its nature, what

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emerges in the thing on its own or, better, the thing as emerging on its own.
Our own being is to understand things, including ourselves, in their nature.
The fullest understanding (and, therefore, the fullest natural humanity) is phi-
losophy, which sees nature as such. Rather than being guided by an opinion
about justice, for instance, rather than being guided by a view that sees justice
only partially (but is just only to the degree that it sees justice at all), the phi-
losopher seeks to be guided by what justice is simply by nature. This natural
justice (and the other things that are first by nature) already lies in advance in
any particular thing that is in any way just. Alternatively, if what distin-
guishes human beings from everything else is “consciousness” or awareness
(or awareness that is aware of itself being aware of other things or that is
aware of itself being aware of itself), things as they are for that original aware-
ness are how they are simply. Otherwise, they will not have been articulated
in terms of what is most permanent and unavoidable. It is only over against an
ineluctable (self) consciousness that things could stand there in a presence
that allows them to be stably articulated for our own stable fullness; if we did
not see them in terms of our consciousness, our approach to them would be
truncated and subject to change, as would our full freeing of ourselves. As it
turns out, to release beings fully to our consciousness is to release objects that
are fully secured by our subjective consciousness; most significant here is the
release of objects understood as causes and effects within a fully secured
methodological approach. In this way, what is simply objective is what it is in
terms of a subjectively controlled and mastered method that sets out in
advance the genuine being (objectivity) in terms of which things can be
discovered.

One might suggest (as the above discussion indicates) that what Heideg-

ger seeks already has been found and articulated. Our free stance toward a
truth of mathematics is precisely to articulate it mathematically, to know it
through proof rather than reducing its truth and our awareness of its truth to
psychological, sociological, historical, mechanical, or chemical origins. We
are ourselves in knowing it as it is. In what way is this (and its analogues in
other areas) insufficient for Heidegger?

Heidegger would hardly deny that science or philosophy is oriented to

what things are as such. But they take for granted a broader horizon within
which their own understanding occurs. Consciousness and nature, for exam-
ple, mean and matter something to us only within a horizon more original

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than they are themselves. This is clear enough for mathematicians or natural
scientists. They work out in detail, in different regions of beings, a particular
notion of what is. What things are is what about them is available to pure
deduction or what about them can be objectively understood in terms of
chemical reactions or quantitative manipulation. Their own discoveries,
however, cannot explain all their actions. In particular, they cannot explain or
describe what first comes into view for manipulation before it is manipulated
or the range, limits, and basis of their original conception. What is taken for
granted is the being of things as we first see them and the way in which we see
them, such that they can be available for objectification. How we first have
and see the things we then objectify is passed over as a fact, as a possibility,
and as a problem. To explore this is to explore a fuller being of things and a
fuller human being in relation to them. It is to explore a more original human
freedom, a more original use of our powers.

Similar considerations affect the other “sciences,” the social sciences, for

instance. What is the nature and power of the political phenomena that we
then “scientifically” treat merely as objects of behavior or possible effects of
rational choice? It is just this kind of question, which points to the limits of
quantitative and behavioral political science, that was asked by the scholars
who defended politics and political philosophy from reduction and elimina-
tion. Arendt, Strauss, Voegelin, and other opponents of behavioral reduction-
ism were students of Heidegger, Husserl, or their colleagues and those they
influenced.

What exactly is the connection between what we first see, that is, what we

see “prescientifically,” and what we see scientifically; and what is the relation
between prescientific and scientific sight? The prescientific does not in any
evident way cause the narrowed and reduced object that the science itself
deals with, nor do the ways we ordinarily concern ourselves with and under-
stand things appear to cause the way we deal with and understand them scien-
tifically. Surely, the book we read is not the mechanical or efficient cause of
its collection of molecules, and it is hard to make out a case that it is its formal
or final cause either. At most, one could call a prescientific thing or “matter”
an odd kind of material cause for its natural scientific and other analogues.
The nature of the precedence (and the nature of the relationship generally) of
what is prescientific to what is scientific, the nature of its being a priori, is
unclear.

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Not only is the nature of the precedence of the prescientific unclear, so too

is its variety and the way we deal with and know it. But perhaps, in fact, these
issues too have been considered sufficiently in the past, at least in Heideg-
ger’s recent past? Heidegger’s reflections clearly stem from those of his
teacher Husserl, though we should immediately add that they also stem from
Aristotle, Kant, Plato, Dilthey, Kierkegaard, and others.

These questions about the connection between the prescientific and scien-

tific are linked to Husserl in particular because the whole issue of the presci-
entific or “natural” attitude and its correlates can be laid out in the terms of
intentionality that were so crucial to Husserl: to understand thought (and
emotion), one must see it as first of all intending, directing itself toward
something, namely, what we intend. Intention and what is intended precede
whatever else we do, so the genuine task of philosophy is to examine pre-
cisely the structures of intentionality and its objects. For Heidegger, as he dis-
cusses the issue in lectures he gave the year before he wrote Being and Time,
the notion of intentionality is on the right track to uncovering our a priori rela-
tion to prescientifically grasped being.

But the difficulty with the analysis of

intention as Husserl and others pursue it is that ultimately it seems to be just
one more version of a conscious subject’s relation to its objects and, in par-
ticular, an elaborate description of consciousness. Consciousness and its
objects, however, seem themselves to be a narrowed version of the prescien-
tific self and its correlates. They are located within a prescientific projection
and are not its source. In a word, the being of intending, what is intended, and
their link are unanalyzed. In fact, one takes for granted a conception of these
as present-at-hand objects; this is the same conception that we take for
granted in all our understanding. Something similar vitiates Kant’s under-
standing of freedom and reason: ultimately they remain within a taken-for-
granted understanding of subjectivity.

If what and how we first intend (and our response to this) is not properly

understood, then the essence of free human action, of what distinctively, irre-
ducibly, and comprehensively is for us has not yet been grasped. From this
point of view, Heidegger’s goal is to understand the being of intentionality,
the being of free transcendence. That is, his effort is to understand more ade-
quately than Husserl and his immediate followers and colleagues what or
who we are and toward what we are correlated as directing ourselves to or
transcending to anything whatsoever. Without such transcending, nothing

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else can be understood. Heidegger radicalizes the effort to specify the ele-
ments of the “natural” attitude because he sees that all attempts to discuss
consciousness, including intentional consciousness, already have reduced or
narrowed what man is as he first directs himself to things, and unthinkingly
depend on glancing at this original realm when they describe this conscious-
ness (or subjectivity), which is then thought to define the very realm that it
takes for granted.

The next question we might ask is whether, even if this is true, conscious-

ness or subjectivity might prove to be the cause of this wider realm of Dasein
and what Heidegger in Being and Time calls his being in the world. But how-
ever consciousness might be a cause, it could not be the cause of this realm as
the very thing that it is, with the relations and activities we talk about, feel,
and work out. After all, what biochemistry and mathematical physics
uncover somehow “cause” us, but they do not cause or define us at the level of
thought, feeling, and action as such. It is not that thought, feeling, action, and
their correlates are added on to the true blind substratum, but rather that this
substratum can come to light as substratum only though subtraction. What
would otherwise be the blind incommensurability of the various theoretical
and scientific analyses of human affairs becomes discussible only looking
back from the full richness of these affairs, not looking up from an otherwise
pointless substratum.

This same inability to come to grips with or take the place of the widest

and richest preprojected realm of understanding is true not just for science but
also, even if in a different sense, for any understanding that has not pressed all
the way to the end. For, such an understanding would not have disclosed us
and what is correlative to us in the fullness of its possibilities, its being and
characteristics, which cannot then be built up from a narrower horizon. The
problem is not that a seemingly comprehensive understanding at one level
(i.e., one that deals with things in identical terms or powers or sense of the
being of its objects) might need to be revised because of new discoveries.
This, after all, is true of any science. The problem is that unless we press com-
pletely to the end to see what lies in advance of our actions and thoughts (and
who we are in this fully original intending or transcending), we may fail to
uncover things that are inexplicable in terms of these “later” actions and
thoughts because they are irreducible to these terms. The full dimension of
man and being cannot be built up and constructed but only narrowed down.

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VII

So, truly free or distinctively human activity is whatever in us is oriented

to full being in this sense or to things insofar as we deal with them as fully in
their being as is possible. Once more, however, this seems to be the claim of
all philosophy and not just Heidegger’s. We might normally say that what is
distinctive in us is reason, that using reason or speech or being reasonable
defines us and constitutes our freedom. “Reason” and its correlates may dif-
fer from Plato and Aristotle to Kant and Hegel and range from speech about
what is natural to self-conscious self-reflection. But the identity is clear
enough.

Why is this not sufficient for Heidegger? One answer is that none of the

philosophers pushed all the way to the end. A second is that each miscon-
ceived being as the causally highest being rather than seeing it as the widest
possible field lying a priori to any activity, including enumerating causes.
This same misconception also leads them to misconstrue the human being
properly correlated to such being. In fact, if seeing being solely as the highest
and most general ever-present cause defines philosophy, then, as philoso-
phers, previous thinkers necessarily failed to push forward.

One indication of this failure is the very nature of the multiplicity of phi-

losophers. Heidegger does not argue that, in effect, one or another of the great
philosophers is wrong or even partial, that, essentially, what some articulated
was a semblance or only a partial glimpse of what is fully enough described
elsewhere. Rather, he argues that each somehow is adequate in himself. Each
asks about the “same” with the same basic questions, yet unlike the sciences,
their “answers” do not replace each other. What, then, is the peculiar status of
their differences and similarity? What is the status of this same that they are
all looking at and seeing in terms of, and who are we as we approach it? The
way in which philosophy has variation and a “history” indicates that it is not
the last word because it does not clearly go all the way to the end in clarifying
its subject and our access to it. Many of the features the philosophers work
with in presumably grasping being—that beings can be seen in what they are
and in the mere fact that they are, that being is somehow general but that there
is also a highest being, and that what is most in being is what causes or
grounds everything else—are unexamined. At least, the philosophers do not
clarify why and that these are the key features of being. Most significant, why
being is conceived and ranked temporally so that philosophers always end up
seeing “being” as what is most fixed or eternal is not thought through.

This all means that the realm to which we most freely direct ourselves and

from which these distinctions must come has been taken for granted, and it is

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precisely this realm, and human beings as having access to it, that Heidegger
seeks to understand.

Let us illustrate Heidegger’s argument with an example. When philoso-

phers uncover being—when, for example, they claim that what is truly just in
an opinion about justice is what is by nature just in it—they argue this claim
by showing that this natural justice causes, explains, or accounts for what is
just in opinions or laws. The justice that truly is is seen as in some sense caus-
ing the just things, or will to power is seen as in some sense causing value, or
true morality is seen as fully free action, and freedom is seen as self-
causation. But why in the first place is being seen as causing or as grounding?
And what prior notions and backdrop enable us to discern as causal the self-
emergent (the natural), or the self-reliant consciousness, or the self-
commanding will? Heidegger argues that philosophy takes for granted
another realm beyond causality and generality that proves to be irreducible to
them. He argues as well that philosophy is blind to what human beings are in
order that we have access to this place, as we always already do. What phi-
losophers call being (or what truly is) is in fact beingness, general character-
istics of beings that are oriented to a highest being such as god the creator.
What is ignored is the realm from which we can first see that these beings are
beings; what is ignored is being as such.

VIII

The fuller a priori realm that Heidegger seeks to uncover and describe

would in fact simply be another area equal to that of the other philosophers,
another description of new beings in causal terms that at best subsumed the
thought of some minor thinkers, unless this realm proves to uncover some-
thing irreducible to beings and their scientific or philosophical descrip-
tion—that is, unless it proves richer than they are and something that we can
show philosophy and science to be always looking at in advance but not
caused by.

One way this richer realm comes to light is precisely through the contrast

with philosophy’s interest in causality. When we point out that being for phi-
losophy is always some kind of causality, we are saying among other things
that what the philosophers call being does not let beings be, but always dis-
cusses them in terms that they are not—namely, things that cause them or that
they cause or higher and purer versions of them. Heidegger’s being, the realm
that always lies there in advance of any being and into and out of which we
look in grasping any being, somehow contains and therefore can “release” or

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free beings and concepts of being, not as reduced to or responsible for some-
thing else but as the very things that they are. Man’s distinctive essence and
freedom are to stand in accord with this freedom of being, this releasing of
entities just as they are on their own. Our prior directedness to this realm in
which things can become available as the very things they are, prior to causal
explanation or any other type of manipulation, is what we are most essen-
tially, and this realm is the place where beings are as such (i.e., this realm is
“being”).

In his later works, Heidegger questions ever more vigilantly whatever in

his earlier efforts still seems to reduce or derive one realm from another, espe-
cially in the sense that even “being” and “time” as he discusses them in Being
and Time are conceived too much as being for the sake of distinguishing,
explaining, and understanding beings. One must describe things as such
rather than force them into a function called for by the theory and not the phe-
nomena. Partially failing to do this was a shortcoming of Heidegger’s origi-
nally conceived discussion of temporality’s serving as the horizon for being.
We can see this in the Grundprobleme of 1927, which contains explicit ele-
ments of the uncompleted third section of the first part of Being and Time.
Just as seeing beings as such means seeing being, so too seeing being must
mean seeing it as such. The point is to see being, time, and man’s openness on
their own; this then also enables us to see beings on their own. (It is central
also to see the interconnections, the “belonging together” of things on their
own, rather than seeing their interconnections as an order of subservience and
supervenience that saps from them their own independence. We will discuss
this below.)

When we say of everything that it is and look for being’s common mean-

ing, it is hard not to think of vapidly general characteristics that all count
equally for every entity. Each can be counted; each is somewhere; each exists
for some time; each has characteristics of some sort such as size, shape, or
attractiveness; each answers to a series of questions.

A second useful way to see the importance, range, and concreteness of

Heidegger’s question of being (in addition to looking as we just have at being
as a priori) is to see how Heidegger replaces this usual sense of being’s gener-
ality. We look at a human action (e.g., an act of courage) and say that we can
explain (or describe) it as stemming from habit or will; we can explain or
describe it as stemming from love of country or of god; we can explain or

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describe it as a proper response to fear and risk that ultimately defines and
produces the good habit; we can describe it in a poem as poetic or romantic or
depict it in a scene as noble or beautiful; we can explain it hormonally; and we
can explain it sociobiologically or economically. Or, we can satisfy ourselves
with mixed versions. When we offer these descriptions and explanations, we
sometimes say that we are discussing courage from different perspectives or
in different regards, or we are considering different aspects of the same thing.
What, then, is this single thing—what is the courage or courageous act that
presents these different aspects? What is the singular approach to that single
thing that we can then consider from different points of view?

This question becomes especially urgent when the aspects under which

the thing is considered do not seem to be easily ranked or to be on the same
plane, yet have their own power. We might consider the difference between a
book, say Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit, as something to be read, bought and
sold, constructed and pulped, celebrated, and endlessly interpreted. What is
the simple unity of which all these are aspects? Are we tempted to say that it is
the book that Heidegger intended? But if interpreters see more clearly what
he intended than he did himself (and some of Heidegger’s own later views of
Being and Time appear to be among these interpretations), why should his
narrow original view define what the work is? Moreover, why should works
in their never simply secure meaning take precedence over the object “book”
in its neutral size, shape, and mass or in its atomic configuration? This is what
is, one might argue, and the rest is flighty and variable addition. But if, in fact,
we normally first come upon the book as an educational commodity in a rou-
tinized, bureaucratized scheme of learning (it is assigned in a course, for
example) and, indeed, if we first come across neutral “science” in this way
too, perhaps the book is primarily an economic or technical commodity.
Whatever the real book, moreover, it is hard not only to see what it truly is but
also how this essence could unify and be the origin of what appear as yawning
gaps among aspects that are not merely different qualities but the correlatives
of markedly different approaches. This difficulty is compounded by the fact
that we could hardly say that or when there could be no more new approaches
or when the current ones would be exhausted.

Heidegger’s interest in something’s “being” as such is at least one version

of this question of the unity that lies in or together with something in any and
all of its aspects and in human being as disclosing this unity. We can fit this
together with his notion of being as a priori. When we do so, we see that the
unity of a being as giving itself in advance to many approaches and views
could not, for him, be found in the causal priority of one approach over the
other because too little would then be seen in its own terms, and the gap

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between approaches (“ways”) would be unbridgeable except by reducing one
approach to another. Moreover, the being as such of anything would then be
noticeable in the same way as one of its aspects. But for Heidegger, this is not
the case: the sky is blue, but where do we see the “is”? Hence, Heidegger
means to locate tools in their being as “readiness to hand,” objects in their
being as presence at hand, and human beings in their being as Dasein when
these modes of being stand in advance of but do not cause the things that have
the mode. And he wants to locate the various philosophical discussions of the
beingness of things (e.g., courage as natural virtue, or as overcoming fear
through certainty, or as moral self-respect, or as self overcoming will)
together in their source in the history of being but not within the priority of
one understanding to another. He then means to locate all these elements to-
gether in being as such and, at least in the link between absence and presence,
in some common “clearing” that lies in advance of anything we think or do.

Still another way to understand the being with which Heidegger is con-

cerned is to consider the distinction perhaps most familiar to us from Plato
and Aristotle between what something is and (the mere fact) that it is. What
each of us is is a human being, and each of us is a particular human being.
None of us exhausts human being, for there are many more from whence we
came, and each of us is too foolish, vulgar, tone-deaf, visually stunted, and
uncoordinated to live up completely to “human being.” That we are is, from
the point of view of what we are (“human being”), unnecessary, and when we
are, we are in a manner too mediocre, too impure, and too fleeting to be
human being simply and fully.

It is extremely difficult to come to grips with and actually to see how a

union of what and that, form and matter, soul and body, unchanging and
changing comes to sight simply as what it is, the single unity that it is, this
what. We immediately conceive the thing in its characteristics or in its materi-
ality (its thisness or its history). But first of all we are directed to anything as
this thing, this apple, and not as apple purely or as “this” purely. The actual
thing precedes in its togetherness (and ultimately grounds) all our divisions,
syntheses, and treatments and all the images, stories, and self- conceptions in
terms of which we see or live “up” to things and ourselves. Heidegger seeks in
many works to depict actual things as the very things that they are, all at once
and yet still complex and compounded. In different ways, this characterizes
his discussion of tools (the hammer in Being and Time), artworks, bridges,

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179

and sacrificial jugs (things). Without reducing or narrowing them to their
function or their specific material, he makes them stand out particularly and
concretely in their use and usability or in the way they draw us into the world
to which they belong. These discussions are some of the most striking and
powerful Heidegger offers. The point then is for him to lay out and display (to
describe and interpret) how we see, hear, discuss (say), and deal with things
as the very things that they are, how they come to meet us this way, and what
the broader contexts are within which this can happen, while still not reduc-
ing or elevating the thing to something other than what it is and while keeping
in question the status of the general statements one can make about all this,
statements that apply not to this or that thing but to everything.

In our account so far, the attempt to see being or any being simply in terms

of the farthest field of vision or widest circle already understood in dealing
with it might appear to be singular, one being at a time, as it were. A being as
such is always this being. This approach is especially prevalent when we use
a simple assertion such as, “This blackboard is here” as our example of “is.”
One feature of Heidegger’s analyses, however, is to start from or always keep
in mind more practical statements, what we say when we are involved in
activities and using things, for example, and not merely gazing at them illus-
tratively or theoretically. In practical use, things are what they are in them-
selves not one by one but only in relationship to other things: the hammer as a
hammer cannot be separated, judged, and measured apart from the world or
context in which it is involved. It cannot be heavy or bulky or hard to maneu-
ver simply on its own in terms of a neutral standard of measure. It is always
“too” heavy for me to use for the job.

What we take for granted in dealing with equipment is precisely a “world”

in this sense of a totality of involvements or connections from which things
first emerge as the useful things that they can be. Such a world is precisely the
first thing (i.e., there are wider circles) that always already lies before us but
that we pass over both in analysis and in everyday action. A world is far from
us because it is the usually unnoticed context beyond any implement to which
we are implicitly directing ourselves to free the implement as an implement.
It is also near to us because it stands so close that we look or step right over it
in dealing with things. When we stop using things and start to consider them
as objects for analysis, and when we consider ourselves as objective analyz-
ers, we forget the worlds we take for granted, and therefore we forget our own

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standing in them. All the conundrums of subject and object, of consciousness
and entities, pass over the original sense in which we are always in a world, so
that what beings are is always released within worlds and never in pure isola-
tion. Worldliness is an ontological event and not merely a report of everyday
facts precisely because everything is what it is only within a world.

The theme of world remains central in Heidegger’s late as well as his early

works, although his discussions vary.

Works of art are what they are by

assembling worlds. A thing such as a jug that holds and pours sacrificial wine
is that very thing that, by assembling together the earth, shapes the void
upward into the sky and the mortals who thank the gods. This assembling
thing lets a world come forth by standing out only in the interplay of these
worldly elements. The jug as this precise thing that it is, not reduced or ele-
vated to something else that causes it such as physical laws or the productive
imitation of the perfect jug for a perfect but abstract “worship” or “rever-
ence,” is the jug in its own being at work in its own meaningful place and
appropriate time. It is the full jug that gathers the possibility of all its aspects,
even if it is only in the history of being that the metaphysical and scientific
aspects unfold.

XII

If this discussion of “being” gives some sense of what we are correlated to,

then who are we in this correlation? Although human being is much more
extensively worked out in Being and Time and the surrounding lectures than it
is later, the central point remains the same: all the characteristics essential to
humans need properly to be understood as revealing being, as correlated to
being, not to substantive characteristics per se. Our being is what directs itself
and stretches out toward, in the broadest sense. Our movements and our
“ends” must be seen this way.

When we conceive man as a “rational animal” or as soul, spirit, and body,

we are not appropriately grasping the human activity of approaching and set-
ting things free as the very things that they are here and now. This is because
reason, soul, spirit, and animal are all descriptions of our being that pass over
our own being in worlds; they overlook the whole being who is being ana-
lyzed into these elements and is doing the analysis. Who are we at first, whom
we then describe as rational animals? Of course, it would be unbelievable if
our everyday and philosophical understandings saw nothing of the truth or
simply made things up. It is not that there are no such things as reason, the
passions, and bodily effort in Heidegger. It is just that these need to be under-

Blitz / HEIDEGGER AND THE POLITICAL

181

stood as interconnected by and while they are revealing the being of beings,
whatever else they do.

The substantive elements of Heidegger’s view therefore involve a new

sense of how reason (and language) is what it is (and of its usual correlative,
truth), a new sense of how we are embedded among other things, and a new
understanding of our moods. I will say a brief word about Heidegger’s novel
understanding of the role and place of passions, moods, and dispositions.
Moods make me clear to myself as the very one who I am here and now, irre-
ducible to other entities, and they then enable or direct me to disclose other
beings in their being in a way correlated to the disposition in which I find
myself.

Moods or dispositions, that is to say, are by uncovering the truth of beings

and ourselves in our being. Several worked-out examples that Heidegger
offers are versions of fear and anxiety, uncanniness (in the sense of awe and
reverence as well as terror), boredom, and wonder. Anxiety reveals all beings
in their possibly not being at all; the various types of fear (horror, ordinary
fear, dread, and the like) depend on the familiarity and detrimentality to our
concerns of specific things that are feared and the distance and speed of their
approach. The point is that something threatening is disclosed as such, as an
impending (future) evil in the very fearing itself. The passion or emotion does
not add some value characteristic to an otherwise disclosed object but, rather,
does the precise job of disclosing this fearsome thing. Presumably, one can
then deliberate about it as such. As with his analysis of equipment, Heideg-
ger’s lengthy analyses of various dispositions are able to make tangible the
nontheoretical things that we encounter.

XIII

Heidegger’s understanding of human being also means to deal in the clear-

est way with the fact, however difficult it is to grasp, of our freedom.

For

much of what is, human beings are required. Were there no men (in our
resolve, or in our simply letting things be, in our melancholy, our anxiety, or
our wonder), there would be neither philosophy nor science, nor all that hap-
pens because of them. There would be no experience of love, nobility, and
justice and all that happens because of that experience. Freedom, as well as
things as they approach us in our freedom, is of the essence. The point then is
to develop our understanding of our characteristics as fully as possible in
terms of this freedom and to develop being as clearly as possible as a correla-
tive of this freedom. True freedom is our freedom for bringing beings as such

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out of their concealment (it is our freedom toward being), and it is being that
preserves beings as such and allows them to be released.

This is connected to the importance for Heidegger of “history.” The quota-

tion marks indicate that Heidegger explicitly disputes “historicism,” arbi-
trariness, thinking in terms of values, and equating what he means by history
to history as a series of past occurrences. To say that being is historically sent
or destined as a variety of epochs or witholdings, or to say that each of
Dasein’s existential structures must also be understood as historical, is not to
be discussing history in any ordinary sense. It is to be discussing the tempo-
rality of things as Heidegger means it. Temporality involves, first, a look at
time as the right and wrong time, the appropriate time, the long time of even
ten minutes of boredom, and not the countable tick-tock of the clock. Each
thing has its time, so time cannot be a neutral measure; by the same token, it
somehow belongs together with everything. It involves, second, a working
out of the future, past, and present that constitutes such time, precisely as they
permit us to release beings in their being as such. Heidegger, therefore, elabo-
rates a notion of past, present, and future as ecstatic openness. This ecstatic
openness is the reaching back by reaching forward that opens us to what is
always already there even in advance of and beyond a world of relations of
things that matter to us. Being in the fullest sense emerges to us as presence
from within what one might call the recoil of our temporality, in which tem-
porality serves as a horizon. In his later works, Heidegger rarely mentions
horizons and thinks more of temporality itself as a kind of extending—that is,
equiprimordially with other characteristics of openness as such—and as
essentially belonging together with being rather than serving as something in
any way alien to which being is somehow reduced. For our purposes, the key
point is that man’s free stance toward being always involves decision, destiny,
fate, history, or temporality, however much Heidegger understands these
phenomena and history itself in novel ways. How we are such that being
comes to presence for us is essentially historical, not finite or limited in some
more permanent dialectical manner, whether Hegelian or Platonic.

As we indicated, Heidegger does not believe that his analysis supports his-

toricism, subjectivism, or relativism. That he talks of “history” and decision
is hardly a defect because no adequate analysis of human being could fail to
account for our freedom, and our freedom is linked to choices and decisions
that are in some ways occasional and unnecessary. The temporality and his-
tory to which he refers concern being and man in his being; they are not, he
argues, causes of something fleeting or descriptions of passing events, which
are then said to determine everything else.

That said, Heidegger’s discussion of man and being does emphasize the

how, the that, and one’s own, rather than the independently attractive, the

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183

what, and the good. Ends and limits, which might well be conceived in the lat-
ter three terms are, rather, thought in terms of the former three.

He surely

emphasizes freedom as decision and destiny rather than as spirited reason-
ableness and reasonable desire. The question is whether Heidegger’s analy-
sis, even when taken ontologically, allows us properly to describe and
explain, at the level of being or beings, the phenomena he underplays.

XIV

With this background, I now want to discuss three concrete subjects in

Heidegger that are of special interest to students of political philosophy: the
polis, the gods, and some of Heidegger’s remarks on National Socialism.
Heidegger discusses the polis in various places and the “country” in others.
He means to distinguish what he says about these (and what he says about
“peoples” in Being and Time and elsewhere) from nations understood as col-
lective subjects that have collective objects. The difficulty with this under-
standing is that, as is true of all subjectivity, it leaves the being of the subject
undetermined. Rather than exploring a collective subject, therefore, Heideg-
ger attempts to discuss peoples and countries as they are revealed by and help
to reveal our being.

One characteristic way that Heidegger deals with the polis can be found in

his lecture courses on Parmenides and on Holderlin’s poem “The Ister.”
These remarks extend and develop (but do not essentially change) what Hei-
degger says in his Introduction to Metaphysics in the course of interpreting
Heraclitus, Parmenides, and Sophocles.

What does Heidegger think the

polis is? The polis is not a political concept, just as the ethical is not a moral
concept but refers to man’s essential dwelling. Rather, the political belongs to
and follows essentially from the polis, not the reverse, as the ethical and the
logical belong to the essence of ethos and logos. Indeed, the polis is less to be
defined than it is to be seen as it was for the Greeks, as naming the realm “that
constantly became questionable anew.”

As such a realm, it “needed certain

decisions whose truth on each occasion displaced the Greeks into the realm
of the groundless or the inaccessible.”

The Greeks were, therefore, not nec-

essarily clear about the polis’ essence. In fact, although Plato and Aristotle
surely reflected on the polis comprehensively, “from where do these thinkers
think the essence of the polis?” It is hardly obvious that the foundations of
Plato and Aristotle’s thought were adequate to question the polis; indeed,
their thought mistakes the essence of the polis, namely, “the fact that it itself
is what is question-worthy and that it wants to be acknowledged and pre-

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served in such worthiness.”

“Perhaps the polis is that realm and place

around which everything question-worthy and uncanny turns in an excep-
tional sense.”

The polis is the pole, the turbulence or vortex, around which everything

turns. This means that it is the constant site around which beings as a whole,
as manifest, turn. Human beings, who understand being, stand in the midst of
beings and necessarily have a status, “a stance in their instances and circum-
stances.” Not state in the sense of “modern state formations” but status in the
sense of a stance in the midst of the site of beings is what is connected to the
polis. The “determinate concept of the essence of the polis with respect to its
ground,” therefore, cannot be found in any usual sense of city or of state.

Perhaps they can be thought through in its terms, but the reverse takes us “on a
path of errancy.”

To say that the polis is the vortex “in which and around which everything

turns” is to say that it is the site “of the abode of human history that belongs to
humans in the midst of beings.” That is, our standing in the midst of beings is
historical (the earlier mentioned realm of decision). Precisely by seeing this
do we see that the polis understood politically is not essential because “what
is essential in the historical being of human beings resides in the pole-like
relatedness of everything to this site of abode, that is, this site of being
homely in the midst of beings as a whole.” From the polis understood as a site
in this sense “springs forth” order, disorder, “what is fitting (or proper) and
what is unfitting.” What is proper determines destiny, which determines his-
tory. To the polis belong gods, festivals, governors, “the people’s assembly,”
the armed forces, and the poets and thinkers. “From out of” the relation to the
gods to the possibility of celebration and to sacrifice and battle, from out of
the relationship between master and slave and to honor and glory, and from
out of the relationship between these relationships “and the grounds of their
unity” “there prevails what is called the polis.”

It is for this reason that the

polis remains worthy of question, and because it is properly worthy of ques-
tion it prevails in permeating all of our essential stance and activity.

The polis is “the open site of that fitting destining” from out of which all

human relations to beings are determined, “and that always means in the first
instance the relations of beings as such to humans.” So, the essence of the
polis

always comes to light in accordance with the way in which beings as such as a whole
enter the unconcealed: in keeping with the expanse of those limits within which this
occurs, and in keeping with the way in which the essence of human beings is determined
in unison with the manifestness of beings as a whole.

Blitz / HEIDEGGER AND THE POLITICAL

185

In fact, we are political beings, as Aristotle says, because we are speaking
beings. That is, we are capable of belonging to the polis because we alone
“can address beings as such with respect to their being.” The essence of the
city “is determined in terms of its relation to the essence of human beings
(and the essence of human beings is determined from out of the truth of
being).”

“The polis itself is only . . . the way the being of beings, in its disclo-

sure and concealment, disposes for itself a ‘where’ in which the history of a
humanity is gathered.”

Because the humanity of the Greek people “is pri-

mordially and exclusively determined from being itself, i.e., from aletheia
(truth), therefore only the Greeks could, and precisely had to, found the polis,
found sites for the gathering and conserving of aletheia.”

In fact, just as “an

interpretation of the polis on the basis of the modern state or the Roman res
publica” “is impossible,” “so is an interpretation of dike (justice) on the basis
of the modern concept of justice and the Roman justitia.” “Dike, understood
as the order which ordains to humanity its relations and comportment, has its
essence from a relation to aletheia, but dike is not determined by and through
a relation to the polis.”

Heidegger discusses not just the polis but also the politeia, the form of

government. The politeia means “everything that concerns the polis.”

His

understanding of the politeia is of the same kind as his understanding of the
polis. When he is discussing Plato’s Politeia (The Republic), Heidegger
argues that because a “thoughtful dialogue always speaks of the being of
beings,” The Republic cannot discuss a particular city but must discuss the
city in its essence. This is the politeia, “what the polis itself is in the totality of
its proper essential relations, i.e., what it authentically is.” Just as ousia
(being) ordinarily means everyday goods and possessions and is “at the same
time” elevated to mean the presence of everything present, so does politeia
mean the life and dealings of the polis “and then correspondingly means the
very structure of the polis in general, from which can then be discerned some-
thing like a ‘constitution.’” In its essence (i.e., the politeia), the polis is the
essential site or ‘where’ of “historical man,” “the where from which alone
order is ordained to him and in which he is ordered. The polis is the ‘where,’
as which and in which order is revealed and concealed.”

Plato’s Republic

looks to be a “utopia” in the ordinary sense because it is “the metaphysically
determined topos (place) of the essence of the polis.” This is to say that it is
the metaphysically determined being of beings and, therefore, is nowhere on
hand as one among others. “In truth,” however, “being, and it alone, is pre-
cisely the topos for all beings.”

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What are we to make of this? The central point is that Heidegger’s discus-

sion of politics is part of his discussion of being. The polis is considered as the
site in which men are open to beings and being, not in any obvious way as the
site for disputes about the common good and the institution of justice. It is a
place for historical decision but in the sense of our free openness to and estab-
lishing of being, not in the sense of practical deliberation. It is not that Hei-
degger would deny that these disputes and deliberations are present. After all,
he lists the many activities that the polis encompasses. Moreover, when he
discusses tools and their functions in Being and Time, he features deliberation
of a sort in his analysis. But his concern in all these instances is with these
activities and deliberations as disclosing being and setting in place contexts
of meaning, relevance, and care. What his discussion lacks, therefore, is
attention to the concrete disputes and judgments that guide and define every-
day political life.

Even when Heidegger touches on law and opinion, on nomos and doxa (as

he does while discussing Heraclitus in the Introduction to Metaphysics), he
mentions only how the many governed by opinion fall away one-sidedly from
the comprehensive logos or being that men of rank—great or authentic artists
and statesmen, for example—establish in the works they produce. Opinion
falls from logos and nature to chatter and semblance. This falling away can
hardly be helped, given the link between being, appearing, and nonbeing and
the outstanding risk that greatness requires. But the statesman’s work in
bringing nature to a stand is, in any event, not built up from these opinions,
not pointed to by them or seen as perfecting them. Rather, its daring erupts
violently against the familiar. And yet, the place the statesman makes is the
“scene of history,” the site of our “historical Dasein,” apparently compatible
with the other great works, the works of poets and priests, as well as with the
people’s assembly. The city’s nomos puts the city together into an “original
unifying unity”; the statesman’s work grounds and preserves the work of
poets, thinkers, and builders of temples.

So, Heidegger points out something of the scope and breadth of the polis at

the same time that he brings out powerfully the strange unease of its greatest
citizens. But his argument, I believe, is insufficiently articulated. For his
interpretation of the city makes it at once too comprehensive and amenable to
the natural simply (the statesman brings nature to a stand in a place in which
priests, poets, people, and thinkers are equally at home) and too disjointed
(the great works erupt against and are not built from the insufficiencies of
familiar experience and opinion, however much they differ from them).

Blitz / HEIDEGGER AND THE POLITICAL

187

It is characteristic of Heidegger that despite linking the polis to what is

question-worthy, he does not make clear the way in which the polis and its
regime are a ground of question about goods, evidence, and ways of life in
concrete ways, along our ordinary paths. The root of philosophic or meta-
physical questioning in everyday uncertainty and desire is not brought out.
Rather, the possibility and necessity of fundamental questioning are relo-
cated to the broadest ground of our free, historical relation to being and to
disclosing beings as beings while standing in the midst of them in the place
called the polis. It is as if the city is a whole that, as a whole, is the place from
which we decide and establish how we will take and understand beings but
which does not put us on a path of question because of immanent desires,
hopes, and uncertainties, including uncertainties about the “gods.” As we see,
the issue of justice is, for Heidegger, even closer to the disclosure of being and
therefore even more remote from the characteristics of ordinary disputes than
is the polis itself. A similar remoteness could be shown in Heidegger’s dis-
cussion of the Greek understanding of what is good and of our relation to risk.

Indeed, even when Heidegger discusses the origin of philosophy in Plato

and Aristotle, he takes it as redirecting or formalizing the “Greek” experience
of nature and of wonder. What he argues is extraordinarily penetrating. But it
is not the whole truth. For there always remains in his discussions an odd gap
or gulf between everyday problems and philosophy or even the arts, so that
the natural tendencies that point to philosophy (and not just philosophy’s
ground in an “historical” replacing or revising of the basic experience of
being) are not brought out. Both practically, in understanding how the polis as
polis points to, stems from, and is limited by a natural root in desire and
unclarity, and theoretically, in understanding the connection of this natural
desire and unclarity to the origin of philosophy, Heidegger too much agglom-
erates or too firmly connects the elements of the polis, so that a single stance
toward beings too rigidly runs through it. At the same time, he too fully sepa-
rates the philosopher from the city so that only a violent eruption or remark-
able decision could establish this comprehensive stance and, therefore, a
place for truth. The great makers and their works are at one and the same time
radically and inexplicably at odds with what is familiar and fully together
with each other and with all people in the political community seen as the
scene of Greek being and human being. Forms of government as ordering dif-
ferent and disputing ways of life are not part of Heidegger’s discussion.

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XVI

This standpoint also is connected to the view that Heidegger takes of the

state and of what he says, in his book on the “Ister” and elsewhere, about
“Americanism,” National Socialism, and Bolshevism. Americanism is char-
acterized by determining being in terms of size and extent, and Bolshevism is
merely a kind of Americanism.

Both are presumably connected to the mod-

ern domination of the totality of the political that Heidegger wishes to distin-
guish from the Greeks as well as from National Socialism. This totality is
connected to the subjective consciousness to which we referred earlier.

“Modern thought grasps all beings in terms of consciousness,” and “as

self-consciousness,”

such consciousness is intent on being unconditionally certain of itself and thereby of all
beings that can be experienced. The fundamental gestalt of such certainty that provides
its measure is the surveyability and indubitability of everything that can be calculated
and planned. That consciousness that wants to be certain of history must therefore be a
consciousness that plans and acts. The fundamental modern form in which the specifi-
cally modern, self-framing self-consciousness of human beings orders all beings is the
state. For this reason, the “political” becomes the definitive self-certainty of historio-
graphical consciousness. The political is determined in terms of history grasped accord-
ing to consciousness, that is, experienced “technically.” The “political” is the way in
which history is accomplished. Because the political is thus the technical and historiog-
raphical fundamental certainty of all action, the “political” is marked by an uncondi-
tional failure to question itself. The questionlessness of the “political” belongs together
with its totality. Yet the grounds and subsistence of such belonging together do not rest,
as some naive minds think, on the arbitrary willfulness of dictators but in the metaphysi-
cal essence of modern actuality in general. Such actuality, however, is fundamentally dif-
ferent from that way of being in which and from out of which the Greek world was his-
torical. For the Greeks, the polis is that which is simply worthy of question. For modern
consciousness, the “political” is that which is necessarily and unconditionally without
question. The way in which the polis is the middle of beings for the Greeks means some-
thing completely different from the unconditional priority of the modern “totality of the
political.”

For the Greeks,

The risk, in which nonbeings must appear as beings, is the tension of the bow upon which
the essence of human beings extends into the counterturning tension of the unhomely. In
accordance with, and as a consequence of, this relation of risk which places human
beings and them alone in the open site in the midst of beings, human beings as those who
are essentially un-homely are the most uncanny beings.

By distinguishing the polis from modern politics, Heidegger intends not to

allow a confusion of the Greek understanding of being with the modern

Blitz / HEIDEGGER AND THE POLITICAL

189

understanding. He also means to differentiate National Socialism from this
modern understanding of political totality and from the Greeks.

“Today,”

one can scarcely read a treatise or book on the Greeks without everywhere being assured
that here, with the Greeks, everything is “politically” determined. In the majority of
“research results” the Greeks appear as the pure National Socialists. This overenthusi-
asm on the part of academics seems not even to notice that with such “results” it does
National Socialism and its historical uniqueness no service at all, not that it needs this
anyhow.

do no service either to contemporary political thought or to the Greeks if one mixes
together, in the overenthusiasm of the “scientific approach” everything that stands by
itself in its own essence and in its specific historical uniqueness. One does no service
whatsoever to our knowledge and evaluation of the historical singularity of National
Socialism if one now interprets the Greek in such a way as to say that the Greeks were all
already National Socialists.

It is not clear precisely what Heidegger means by the Nazis’ historical sin-

gularity, but he clearly intends not to equate either it or the polis with the mod-
ern subjective and technical understanding in which politics takes a leading
place in organizing all our comprehension and production in technical terms,
that is, in terms that first see and deal with everything as things that stand on
reserve to be manipulated and rearranged. Dictators, or what he calls in
“Overcoming Metaphysics” “leader natures,” have their place within this
technical dominance: they do not control it. If there is a difficulty with the
actual Nazis, which would account for the ambiguity of Heidegger’s
remarks, it likely is that they proved to be too much a part of modern total
politics. The historical singularity that Heidegger sees would be the way that
National Socialism could have been in 1933 (and perhaps for Heidegger in
1942 could be still?) a place, or “state,” of authentic questioning of being, a
site where beings other than technical objects and human beings other than
those who respond only to identical possibilities and trivial, technical, self-
alienating, and self-forgetting concerns could reemerge.

XVII

As is true of Heidegger’s discussions of everydayness and related con-

cepts in Being and Time and of his analysis of modern philosophy in Nietz-

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POLITICAL THEORY / April 2000

sche, his remarks about the contemporary dominance of the political and the
technical open significant avenues for reflection. Nonetheless, in the context
of modern political affairs, we must first be struck by the limits of Heideg-
ger’s terms of discussion, for they glide over or ignore the distinctions neces-
sary to understand more adequately the differences and different order of
merit among liberal democracy and Bolshevik and Nazi tyranny. Heidegger
is considering the essence of politics, someone might reply, politics in its
being and our openness to being simply and beings as such: these other dis-
tinctions belong to some function or stand at some level with which Heideg-
ger does not wish to concern himself. Even were this true, one might counter
that it would still be reasonable to denounce someone who in his lectures,
publications, and actions uses politically relevant terms in a politically
charged atmosphere. One might say next, in a deeper theoretical criticism,
that Heidegger’s “ontological” understanding of the polis, America, and the
Nazis not only ignores but cannot bring to light or make sense of these politi-
cal and moral distinctions or that it usurps the place of these distinctions. It
does not merely glide over but pushes aside or destroys the seriousness of
political distinctions by “overcoming” metaphysics and the “philosophical”
connection between what is best and what is in the strictest sense (e.g., by
being a highest cause). But, someone might reply, Heidegger’s understand-
ing is, consequently, morally and politically neutral as such, and only out of
poor judgment or, indeed, for unsavory political reasons or preferences does
Heidegger allow his ontological remarks to have the political resonance that
they do. Finally, one might counter that Heidegger’s understanding replaces
the grounds of politically sensible distinctions but in a way that is not merely
neutral to them but that, rather, recommends, makes more likely, or makes
more attractive his working with and praising the Nazis, however ambiguous
the praise can be made to sound. Heidegger understands and is willing to live
with or even justify the political consequences of lumping Americans and
Bolsheviks together on the wrong side of the ontological tracks and putting
the Nazis at least potentially in a better neighborhood.

I would argue that the last, or most serious, explanation is the truest, that

not just Heidegger’s politics but also his ontological understanding recom-
mends supporting the Nazis, at least for his time. The reason is that his under-
standing of being and man’s being sees the political community as exces-
sively inclusive. He replaces what limits and moderates actual politics—
internal partisanship and the necessary cosmopolitanism of any country’s
arts, philosophy, and poetry—with a certain kind of totality. Everything in
America is seen as Americanism, and everything about the Nazis can for a
time be seen to be situated in the attempt to battle Americanism’s danger-

Blitz / HEIDEGGER AND THE POLITICAL

191

ously narrow and restrictive dominance over what beings mean. Heidegger’s
ontologically rooted immoderation leads him to expect too great a coordina-
tion between philosophy and politics because he forgets both the limits to
philosophy’s possible subservience to politics that derive from philosophy’s
cosmopolitanism and the limits to philosophy’s possible guidance of politics
that derive from political partisanship and disputes. Moreover, because sup-
porting what is liberal and what is democratic is rooted in understanding how
cosmopolitan activities and partisan interests limit the sway of peoples and
countries, Heidegger’s immoderate misunderstanding brought about not
only his mistaken hopes for his own place among the Nazis but also his
unchangingly excessive view of what is wrong with “Americanism” and his
continual praise for some form of National Socialism. Indeed, the difficulty
here is not only political for, as we have said, Heidegger’s understanding
obscures the path from the actual questions, disputes, and uncertainties of
politics and the search for happiness to seeking what things are simply.
Hence, the fullness of beings and the horizons that are always already there
ahead of us are also somehow misconstrued.

XVIII

What are the gods? In Heidegger’s discussions of theology and of “God,”

he makes clear that an understanding of being precedes an understanding of
God. Metaphysically, a god is the highest being. Theologically, divine char-
acteristics are understood in the light of a metaphysical interpretation of what
being is. To think as we do of God as a creator is to conceive of creation as a
kind of effecting. This, in turn, is to interpret producing in a certain way, not
as bringing something out into its own limits, which is how Plato, Aristotle,
and the “Greeks” in general saw it, but as working, making, and realizing as
an efficient cause. According to Heidegger, that a creating god “exists” can-
not be determined by his thinking or even by metaphysics beyond whatever
simply rational demonstrations it offers.

Heidegger’s later discussions of the gods also occur within the view that

our standing within an openness to being precedes any understanding of god.
“Western man” needs “an experience of the essence of being as the domain in
which a decision about godlessness and the gods can first be prepared.”

Most of Heidegger’s later view fits together with his discussion of Holderlin
and of Greek poetry such as Antigone.

The gods are the immortals, which

means that they do not understand, reveal, or stand within being as such; only
man does this. The advent of a god requires the prior projection of the divini-

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POLITICAL THEORY / April 2000

ties; this itself requires a prior understanding of holiness and what is holy.
Such an understanding could not arise without a preceding understanding of
being and what belongs to it. In fact, what is holy and divine seem essentially
to refer to the essence of beings in being. For the Greeks this is “being in its
primordial looking-into and shining”: “to theion is precisely being itself
looking into the ordinary.”

(In this it is connected to wonder, for which what

is most usual is seen as most unusual.) This means as well that the divine is
correlated to our being because “man is the one who has the word.” “The
word is in essence the letting appear of being by naming,” and this “naming of
being, the mythos, names being in its primordial looking-into and shin-
ing—names to theion.”

The divine, as well as the contemporary possibility

that Heidegger tries to bring forth of “awaiting” gods, is, therefore, funda-
mentally connected not to some appearance by gods out of the blue but to our
own understanding of ourselves in our ability to see being and beings as such.
This understanding of ourselves as disclosing beings in the truth of their
being can be contrasted with our merely falling into beings and forgetting
how our actions and the things we make gather and assemble worlds.

Heidegger’s discussion of gods thus means less than might appear at first.

He certainly does not claim that he can show that gods exist, nor does he dis-
cuss their potency. He says at most that thinking properly about our place
within being can allow us to await them. As best one can tell, reverence for
gods could belong to a new sense of our own uncanniness, of what is fear-
some about ourselves. We are uncanny because we are ourselves by standing
out, as ourselves, into being and then passing being by and losing ourselves in
beings. Yet, dealing with beings as such is precisely the way that we establish
presence, meaning, and our own possibilities. We are ourselves both by
standing outside ourselves in being and by losing being and our own being in
beings. Moreover, we find our being only when what is uncanny about
beings—their own grounding in being—announces itself, and we (or the
poets and thinkers among us) interpret discursively what is announced and
see our place within this strange emptiness.

Heidegger discusses this uncanniness together with his talking about gods

only after Being and Time, but he discusses uncanniness in Being and Time as
well. In any event, uncanniness is obviously connected to the discussion of
anxiety in Being and Time, where, as we said, anxiety serves as the mood that
reveals our responsibility for disclosing beings qua beings, beings as such.
Indeed, there are other moods in which things can no longer matter to us or in
which their simply being can strike us—boredom of a certain sort, for exam-
ple, and wonder or even a kind of philosophic melancholy. Heidegger takes
certain moods—anxious fear and trembling, uncanny reverence, thankful

Blitz / HEIDEGGER AND THE POLITICAL

193

wonder—that sometimes are said to reveal God’s or gods’ existence and
shows that these moods in fact reveal our own relation to being and not to any
entity in particular. Heidegger does not believe that the Greek gods simplisti-
cally had the powers ascribed to them, nor is it clear that he thought that “the
Greeks,” let alone the poets and philosophers, did either. In my judgment, his
understanding remains similar to his view in Being and Time that the authen-
tically resolute man who understands that he is thrown into his own mortality
can choose or be his own hero, that is, that he understands reverence. Heideg-
ger’s view of the gods that we might await remains linked to Nietzsche’s
understanding of Greek gods as reflecting the Greeks’ gratitude and rever-
ence for themselves. What is to be revered about us is our uniqueness as the
discloser of being and of beings in their being, and if our being could once
more have free play, gods might again matter to us. “The Greek gods are not
‘personalities’ or ‘persons’ that dominate being; they are being itself as look-
ing into beings.”

“A-theism,” correctly understood as the gods-lessness, has been, since the decline of the
Greek world, the oblivion of being that has overpowered the history of the West as the
basic feature of this history itself. . . . “A-theism” is not the “standpoint” of “philoso-
phers” in their proud posturing.

Heidegger’s talk of awaiting gods, therefore, fits together with the rest of his
thought. Indeed, it is subservient to it in the sense that it is part of his overall
understanding of our openness to being or our revealing of worlds but is
surely not a causal or even dominant feature. If political philosophy in the
sense of rational exploration of the question of justice, reasonable explora-
tion of alternative opinions about the most just regime and way of life, and
practical discussion of the inevitability of partisanship is indeed replaced in
Heidegger, it is not replaced by the gods as such but by his thought generally,
including his understanding of gods whom we can await.

NOTES

1. Martin Heidegger, Brief uber den Humanismus, in Wegmarken (Frankfurt am Main:

Vittorio Klostermann 1967). The German text was first published in 1947. Translated in Martin
Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 232 ff.

2. Heinrich Ott, Martin Heidegger, trans. Allan Blunden (New York: Basic Books, 1993).
3. Martin Heidegger, Holderlin’s Hymne “Der Ister” (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Kloster-

mann, 1984). The lectures were first delivered in the summer of 1942. Translated by William
McNeil and Julia Dreyfus, Holderlin’s Hymn “The Ister” (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1996).

194

POLITICAL THEORY / April 2000

4. Ibid., sec. 14.
5. Leo Strauss, Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1983), 32.

6. See Ister and Introduction to Metaphysics. Martin Heidegger, Einfuhrung in die Meta-

physik (Tubingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1966) (first published in 1953). These lectures were
first delivered in 1935. Translated by Ralph Manheim, An Introduction to Metaphysics (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959).

7. See On Time and Being. Martin Heidegger, Zur Sache Des Denkens (Tubingen: Max Nie-

meyer Verlag, 1969). Translated by Joan Stambaugh, On Time and Being (New York: Harper &
Row, 1972).

8. See History of the Concept of Time. Martin Heidegger, Prolegomena zur Geschichte des

Zeitbegriffs (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1979). The lectures were first delivered
in 1925. Translated by Theodore Kiesiel, History of the Concept of Time (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1982).

9. Compare “Das Ding” and Unterwegs zur Sprache to Sein und Zeit. Martin Heidegger,

Sein und Zeit, 7th ed. (Tubingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1953) (original edition published in
1927). Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, Being and Time (New York:
Harper & Row, 1962) and also by Joan Stambaugh (State University of New York Press, 1996).
Martin Heidegger, “Das Ding” in Vortrage und Aufsatze (Pfullingen: Neske, 1954). First deliv-
ered as a lecture in 1950. Translated by Albert Hofstadter, “The Thing,” in Poetry, Language,
Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1971). Martin Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache (Pfullin-
gen: Neske, 1959). Translated by Peter Hertz, On the Way to Language (New York: Harper &
Row, 1959).

10. See Introduction, 170.
11. See On Time and Being.
12. See Introduction, 131, 133, 152, 191.
13. Ister, 80.
14. Ibid., 80-81.
15. Ibid., 81.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid., 82.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid., 82-83.
21. Ibid., 83.
22. Martin Heidegger, Parmenides (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1982). The

lectures were first delivered in the winter of 1942-1943. Translated by Andre Schuwer and
Richard Rojcewicz, Parmenides (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 96.

23. Ibid., 96.
24. Ibid.; Introduction, 160.
25. Ister, 81.
26. Parmenides, 95.
27. Ibid.
28. See Introduction, 131, 133, 152-53, 162, 191.
29. Ister, 90. See Introduction, 37-38, 45-46.
30. Ister, 94-95.
31. Ibid., 89.
32. Ibid., 80.
33. Ibid., 86.

Blitz / HEIDEGGER AND THE POLITICAL

195

34. See Introduction, 198-99.
35. Parmenides, 113. See also Ister, 120.
36. See also, however, “The Thing,” 184.
37. Parmenides, 115.
38. Ibid., 112.
39. See Letter and “The Thing.”
40. Parmenides, 111.
41. Ibid., 112.

Mark Blitz is Fletcher Jones Professor of Political Philosophy and director of research at
Claremont McKenna College. He has served as associate director of the United States
Information Agency and is the author of Heidegger’s “Being and Time” and the Possibil-
ity of Political Philosophy, as well as many articles on topics in political philosophy,
American politics, and foreign affairs.

196

POLITICAL THEORY / April 2000

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